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I would think either would work. Note that populated and populous don't mean exactly thie same thing. Any place that has inhabitants at all is populated. Populous means heavily populated. Since you already say third most, you don't need to say populous, but you certainly could if you wanted to emphasize the large number of people (just like saying: "the third most heavily populated ...") By the way, you shouldn't be using a hyphen. It's just "third most populated..." etc.

Populated means the total number of people in the country whereas populous means number of people per square kilo meter i.e population density. Let me explain further:

The most populated country has maximum number of people in comparison to all the countries of the world irrespective of its land or area. Whereas the most populated country means the it has the maximum population per 1 square kilo meter which makes more citizens to live in less area. Or you can say it has the highest population according to its area Or is the most crowded country. A country may be least populated because it has say only 80 lakh people but is most populous because it has only 10 thousand sq. Km land where everybody has to accommodate.

Both have different meanings and will refer to different countries in the above sentence.Hope it helped.

@Mani - 'would' has lots of uses apart from in conditionals - here I would say that it softens the statement, makes it a little more tentative - it's often used with words like 'think, imagine, say, suggest, recommend, appear, seem'

In your second example, you still need to keep the second would - 'I would think either would work'

You would not hyphenate "most-populous" just as you wouldn't hyphenate "she is the most popular girl in school." You would however hyphenate something like "Honolulu is an ultra-populous urban epi-center."